BBC Dad and His Family Finally Speak: “It’s a Comedy of Errors”

By now, the clip has been shared on your Facebook timeline by friends and brands alike. It’s been emailed, texted, and gchatted. Your coworkers have asked over cubicle walls if you’ve seen it. Of course you have. It’s delightful. The viral video in question is, obviously, the moment in which a very serious-seeming man is weighing in on the impeachment of South Korea’s president remotely from his home office in Busan, South Korea. His daughter bursts in first, waving her elbows back and forth, and her brother follows closely on her heels in a baby-walker. Their mother frantically grabs them, and they have to be dragged out of the room. End scene. Commence virality.

“It’s a comedy of errors,” Robert Kelly , an associate professor of political science at Pusan National University in South Korea, told The Wall Street Journal in a new interview, conducted after the cilp went viral on Friday. During the BBC appearance, his wife Kim Jung-A and children, four-year-old Marion and eight-month-old James, were gathered in the living room to watch. Kim was focused on recording the appearance, and had her eyes locked on the screen, according to Kelly.

Marion was extremely excited to see her father on TV, but she did an even better job of recognizing that he was filming from a room right down the hall, so she went to find him. James followed, as he is reportedly wont to do. Suddenly, it’s the scene we all have stored in our memory banks in the same place we keep “Charlie Bit My Finger” and “I Like Turtles.” Marion bursts into the room, waving her elbows about jauntily. James is hot on her heels.

There’s a reason Marion was extremely excited, though, besides seeing her father on a screen. “She was in a hippity-hoppity mood that day because of [her birthday party earlier that day in kindergarten],” Kelly said to the W.S.J. Kelly tried to direct his daughter out of frame to play with some toys nearby. He also “thought the BBC might cut away to other footage or try to narrow the camera angle.”

Luckily, they didn’t, so we could all have a joyful viral moment to distract us from the awful stuff that makes up the rest of TV news. Marion sat down, and that’s when he “knew it was over,” Kelly said.

A delay on the feed meant that his wife didn’t see what was happening until Marion plopped down on the floor and James was also in the room with her husband. She raced into the room, skidding on her socks, and trying to remain out of the camera frame.

After the interview, Kelly emailed the BBC to apologize; the broadcaster, in turn, asked if it could put the clip online. “The couple initially declined, feeling uncomfortable that people might laugh at their children. But they were eventually persuaded that the video would show they were just a regular family,” the Journal reports. It has since been viewed over 85 million times on the BBC One Facebook page. They will also be holding a press conference on Wednesday at the university where Kelly teaches.

As to another thing many watching the clip have wondered: Yes, Kelly is wearing pants. He’s all business up top with a jacket and tie, but he was wearing “comfortable jeans out of camera shot.” Case closed.

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